The Recreations of a Country Parson eBook

Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 487 pages of information about The Recreations of a Country Parson.

The Recreations of a Country Parson eBook

Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 487 pages of information about The Recreations of a Country Parson.
Mr. Verjuice, know how Mr. Swetter, Q. C., has been rising at the bar; you know how well he deserves the ermine.  Well, walk down to his chambers; go in and sit down; never mind how busy he is—­your time is of no value—­and talk of many different men as extremely suitable for the vacant seat on the bench, but never in the remotest manner hint at the claims of Swetter himself.  I have often seen the like done.  And you, Mr. Verjuice, may conclude almost with certainty that in doing all this you are vexing and mortifying a deserving man.  And such a consideration will no doubt be compensation sufficient to your amiable nature for the fact that every generous muscular Christian would like to take you by the neck, and swing your sneaking carcase out of the window.

Even a slight disappointment, speedily to be repaired, has in it something that jars painfully the mechanism of the mind.  You go to the train, expecting a friend, certainly.  He does not come.  Now this worries you, even though you receive at the station a telegraphic message that he will be by the train which follows in two hours.  Your magazine fails to come by post on the last day of the month; you have a dull, vague sense of something wanting for an hour or two, even though you are sure that you will have it next morning.  And indeed a very krge share of the disappointments of civilized life are associated with the post-office.  I do not suppose the extreme case of the poor fellow who calls at the office expecting a letter containing the money without which he cannot see how he is to get through the day; nor of the man who finds no letter on the day when he expects to hear how it fares with a dear relative who is desperately sick.  I am thinking merely of the lesser disappointments which commonly attend post-time:  the Times not coming when you were counting with more than ordinary certainty on its appearing; the letter of no great consequence, which yet you would have liked to have had.  A certain blankness—­a feeling difficult to define—­attends even the slightest disappointment; and the effect of a great one is very stunning and embittering indeed.  You remember how the nobleman in Ten Thousand a Year, who had been refused a seat in the Cabinet, sympathized with poor Titmouse’s exclamation when, looking at the manifestations of gay life in Hyde-park, and feeling his own absolute exclusion from it, he consigned everything to perdition.  All the ballads of Professor Aytoun and Mr. Theodore Martin are admirable, but there is none which strikes me as more so than the brilliant imitation of Locksley Hall, And how true to nature the state of mind ascribed to the vulgar snob who is the hero of the ballad, who, bethinking himself of his great disappointment when his cousin married somebody else, bestowed his extremest objurgations upon all who had abetted the hateful result, and then summed up thus comprehensively:—­

    Cursed be the foul apprentice, who his loathsome fees did earn;
    Cursed be the clerk and parson; cursed be the whole concern!

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The Recreations of a Country Parson from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.